SWOWS and dynamic queries to build browsing applications on linked data

The Linked Data Initiative is pushing dataset maintainers to publish data online in a highly reusable way through a set of open standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. The amount and variety of available structured data in the Web is increasing but its consumption is still quite limited. In particular applications used to explore linked data are mostly either generic linked data browsers or applications with hard-coded logic tailored for specific needs. SWOWS is a platform for declarative specification of applications consuming linked data. In this paper we describe the use of the platform for creating browsing applications tailored to specific contexts, and show how the declarative paradigm preserves flexibility of the application. To this end, the platform has been extended to allow the dynamic generation of SPARQL queries. An example of a linked data browser created with the platform is given.